Olga Lucovnicova’s documentary feature debut, produced by Off World, will involve a journey to another planet. At least that’s what she thought Russia was when growing up as a small girl in neighbouring Moldova, and where her father lived, who she imagined would one day visit her as a cosmonaut.
It was also where her grandmother Antonina lived, in the city of Asha, a beautiful woman who could sing like an angel, made beautiful clothes and worked “like a good Soviet” in a car manufacturing factory. But she was also a tortured individual who committed suicide (or “ended her life by her free will,” as Lucovnicova prefers to phrase it) at the age of 51 just before the collapse of the Soviet Union and not long before her future grand-daughter was born.
The event was the source of profound pain and trauma for the family in Russia, suffered in stoic silence but nevertheless the progenitor of, as Lucovnicova says, “uncontrollable fears, anxiety and sleepless nights in us.”
In her RE>CONNEXT project Last Letters from My Grandma the director will return to Planet Russia together with her father to piece together her grandmother’s life and try to understand what drove her to end it. “Layer by layer, I discover how her life was affected by the WWII, famine and the Kyshtym radioactive disaster. I explore her apartment, I meet different family members talking about her life, love and death,” she says.
But what emerges, she underlines, are two divergent realities, an idealised version of Antonina, the family and the USSR as retained by the family itself, and the Antonina that Lucovnicova came to know after her father passed on to her the letters written by her grandmother many decades ago.
“These [are] letters which are all older than me, and in these letters I could read for the first time about her life from her point of view, because I never met her,” says Lucovnicova. “But at the same time, all my life, I heard from my father that I’m very similar to her. So in a way I am searching for myself through discovering who my grandmother was.”
The letters, Lucovnicova adds, offer an alternative history of that time, or talk about things which recorded history ignored or deemed not important enough to chronicle. “That’s why I feel that my grandmother is a kind of symbol of an era. So it’s not just a private story, but also a universal story.”
Lucovnicova understands how difficult it can be for the subjects of documentaries to allow close scrutiny of their personal lives. She refers to it as “an invasion” and one that she experienced herself in making her painfully honest My Uncle Tudor, when she first told her own history (or part of it) in documentary. But in revealing something which is “untold and hidden” via such close analysis (and in this she derives inspiration from the films of the legendary Chantal Ackermann and Dutch filmmaker Aliona van der Horst) it is easier to reach “this point of knowledge,” she acknowledges.
In the film, trains will be a leitmotif. It is the mode of transport that will take her and her father back to where he lived, back to the flat in Russia which was “the witness to the happiest and hardest moments of my family history.” It was on a train that her great grandfather died, and her grandmother had earlier tried to commit suicide by throwing herself under a passing locomotive. In the same year nearly 600 Soviet holidaymakers were killed in the nearby Ufa train disaster as a result of a gas leak from a faulty pipeline.
Later this year, Lucovnicova will commence PhD research into ‘post-memory in first-person documentary films’ at KU Leuven University, investigating “how private memories and archives can be used by contemporary filmmakers working on trauma and memory of military conflicts.”
“I would like to add that RE> CONNEXT is the place where the project [Last Letters…] will be presented for the first time to a large audience,” she says. “For me, this is an important and necessary step and an opportunity to find people interested in its production, since I am at the initial stage of working on this film, which I have been thinking about for many years and in which I really believe, because it will contain a large part of my soul.”
“I want to find peace with this past,” she ends.
